Ghosts in the star machine

The elusive 'social media manager' is a phantom hiding in plain sight

Twitter, Instagram and Facebook may be essential to modern fame, but many stars and politicians can’t (or won’t) handle them. It’s the social media manager who keeps a celeb on message, out of trouble and – above all – ‘authentic’.

Hiring a social media manager is like handing your car keys over to someone you’ve had coffee with once, maybe twice. Sure, he seems nice; his shirt is tucked in; he appears to have a handle on the basic workings of Twitter and Facebook and Instagram – have at it! And just like that, he has your Twitter password and he’s going to take your account out for the day. He may make a few wrong turns, run a few red lights – you see where we’re going with this – but he’ll have it back for you in the garage by nightfall.

Sometimes, though, the car gets totalled and you have to take the keys back.

In May, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio hired Scott Kleinberg, who had been running social media at the Chicago Tribune, as his social media director, one of the more high-profile digital management positions, at least in the political realm. After just eight weeks, Kleinberg quit, writing on Facebook that his “dream job” had turned out to be just the opposite. “I tried to stick it out, but it was impossible,” Kleinberg wrote, explaining he had to leave for “the sake of my health and my sanity.” He vented that he was working “13-hour” days (plus weekends) in the role and also said the mayor’s office had mandated that he get approval on anything he posted, even on his personal social media accounts.

Kleinberg declined to discuss his short-term gig working for the mayor and sounded uncomfortable when the conversation veered close to politics. But he was confident, and calm, when I asked him to share the most important piece of social media advice he gives to people he works with: “My key thing that I tell people is just to be yourself. Don’t pretend like you have to put on this ridiculous persona.” His speech sped up when explaining the occasional phoniness of celebrity social media output. “Of course, there are celebrities out there who hire ghostwriters, and it isn’t actually them, and you don’t know – they try to pass it off,” he said. “It’s not necessarily as authentic an experience as you think, although some fans don’t know the difference, [and] some fans don’t care.” He concluded, with the slightest hint of despair, “You just, you don’t, you don’t know.”

A City Hall spokeswoman gave a statement regarding Kleinberg’s departure: “New York City government is a tough, fast-paced job that is not for everyone.” Kleinberg deleted his Facebook post about his ill-fated City Hall tenure, though nothing can ever be completely erased when it comes to social media. The screenshots linger.

In the current cultural climate, having a social media presence is essentially mandatory for any up-and-coming singer or actor or model (or politician); a 20-year-old industry newcomer without a single digital account would be like someone showing up to a black-tie wedding in a ripped T-shirt – or, more precisely, like someone not showing up to the wedding at all.

Though it can be easy to forget now, there was a time before Facebook (founded in 2004), Twitter (which debuted in 2006) or Instagram (released in 2010), an age prior to Donald Trump tweets, Kim Kardashian selfies, all-caps Kanye West Twitter monologues and glistening Taylor Swift Fourth of July Instagrams. Nowadays, we don’t read about celebrity engagements or pregnancies in newspapers, or even on blogs; we find out from the celebrities themselves, on their Twitter and Instagram accounts. The numbers are staggering, across all fields: actor Vin Diesel surpassed 100 million Facebook likes this summer; popstar Katy Perry has accumulated more than 93 million Twitter followers; soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo’s Instagrams are seen by more than 79 million people. And we, those millions, watch, enraptured. We see photos of celebrities’ babies for the first time on social media; we learn what movies stars will be appearing in and when those movies will be released; and – in the case of the Kardashians and their seemingly all-access Snapchat accounts – hell, we basically take showers and eat all their meals with them, too.

Casting decisions are sometimes made based on which actor has the largest social media following. (“If it came down to two professional actors… We’d go with the one who could get the [social media ] numbers,” a casting director told the Wrap in 2015.) Brands hire Instagram-popular stars to appear in their campaigns, such as Calvin Klein’s recent omnipresent ads starring Kendall Jenner and Justin Bieber. In the case of DJ Khaled and his popular Snapchat account (which led to a self-help book, releasing this month) or Anna Kendrick and her pithy Twitter account (which led to her book of essays, also due this month), projects and deals are regularly set into motion based on celebrities’ social media prowess.

Long gone are the days of being able to admire your favourite celebrity only as she stared at you from a poster on your bedroom wall: Now they live inside your phone. And they always have a lot to say (mostly about themselves), and a whole bunch of pictures to show you.

While some celebrities out there are handling this output mostly on their own – especially ones who grew up with technology and are very comfortable expressing themselves digitally – the social media age also means a new kind of professional has arisen, in the semi-shadows, around the famous people themselves. They can go by any one of a number of names: digital strategist, social media manager, brand consultant. In certain cases, the job is taken on by a publicist or an assistant or “someone at the label”. It could be one person, or a team of 10. But every celebrity, to some extent, has a force behind the scenes, aiding or guiding him or her in tweeting, Instagramming and Facebooking.

Tweet Beginnings

Even as recently as 2012, high-profile actors and musicians were not, for the most part, spending a whole lot of time worrying about their social media accounts. Ashton Kutcher had reached a million followers on Twitter several years earlier, in 2009, and Facebook had become a unifying cultural juggernaut. But there was still a wide swath of celebrities not on social media and one could imagine a publicist hypothesizing that, as MySpace or Napster had, Twitter and Facebook might soon dissolve in the digital rearview mirror.

Patrick Mulford, chief creative officer of theAudience, a company founded in 2011 to help celebrities build and maintain their social media accounts, told me that when he joined the organization, in 2013, many of the celebrities they would meet with were not at all enthused about the platforms. “When we first started publishing for celebrities, not only did they not really think about social media to any great extent, they were very cynical about it,” Mulford said. In spite of this apathy, many celebrities still signed on, encouraged by their management, perhaps influenced by theAudience’s two high-profile co- founders, Ari Emanuel and Sean Parker.

While some actors who partnered with theAudience, such as Charlize Theron and Emma Watson, would offer general guidelines for the company about what their social feeds should look like, and then let theAudience more or less take it from there (in Theron’s case, she was primarily interested in promoting her charitable efforts; Watson wanted to keep the focus on her acting work), there were others, such as Tyra Banks, who, per a former theAudience employee, would want to “see and review and copy edit herself”, any copy that was posted on her pages. There were about 10 people working for the company initially, but the operation quickly grew to about 150 people; theAudience’s copywriters – who worked on accounts for celebrities ranging from Hugh Jackman to rapper Azealia Banks – would typically draw up a plan for a given month of Facebook content, based on many conversations with either the celebrity or his or her team, and, once they had approval, they would schedule the posts, timed to the actor’s or artist’s upcoming release dates and appearances. If you’ve ever matched with someone on a dating app and then handed your phone over to a good friend and pleaded, “Can you just talk to them for me?” and let your friend take the reins, well, theAudience was basically the celebrity social media version of that.

After a few years, a shift occurred, though, as theAudience saw an opportunity to align itself with brands, as opposed to the celebrities themselves. (McDonald’s, American Express, Ford and Universal are among its current clients.) “The main reason [for the switch] was that the celebrities wanted more money and they weren’t necessarily interested in creating content,” Mulford told me. “You look at how much money is being made with celebrities, it was hardly close to the same amount as there was working with brands.”

The Quest For Authenticity

The word “authenticity” came up about once every three minutes in all the discussions I had with social media managers, experts and the celebrities themselves – and, almost every time, my thoughts would turn to Rihanna. (To be fair, my thoughts turn to Rihanna immediately in almost all contexts.) In 2012, around the same time as the release of her seventh album, aptly titled Unapologetic, Rihanna’s social media presence seemed to shift. Previously, the posts on her accounts had been bland and oriented around promoting her music, seemingly posted by her label. But, at about this point, as if the “real” Rihanna had been unlocked by some kind of video game cheat code, the singer began posting content that felt, wholly, like “the real her”. She would share photos of silly and strange off-the-cuff moments with longtime friends; she would “clap back” to haters on Twitter; she would post video clips from raucous parties (and chill parties, too). She went from coming across as a cipher to… well, coming across like one of your friends from college who was always up to something wild, off to a warehouse party at 2am when you were ready to call it a night.

Rihanna was not the first celebrity to embrace his or her “true” persona on social media, but her shift was one of the most pronounced, and indicative of an overall trend as celebrities moved away from working with consultancies, such as theAudience, and decided to take more control. Yes, they (in most cases) still had help, but it was handled less overtly.

“Most of the celebrities that actually have been effective on [social media] definitely are willing to allow a pretty high level of transparency,” mused Frank Cooper, chief marketing officer at BuzzFeed (and formerly CMO of global consumer engagement at PepsiCo), citing Rihanna and also Taylor Swift as celebrities who have managed to perfect the “authenticity” smoothie recipe, making their fan bases feel as if they know them intimately. “They don’t have to produce everything, but they need to be at the centre of the interaction with their audience and with their followers.”

Tania Yuki, founder and CEO of Shareablee, which helps businesses process and parse social media content, echoed Cooper’s take. “The whole challenge of celebrity in bygone eras was what you can manage to conceal from the public,” she told me. “It’s so interesting that now the challenge of celebrity is how to really open the floodgate and reveal as much as possible about how you’re living in the world.”

The Candidates

The summer of 2016 has been dominated by – in addition to the inexplicable resurgence of both chokers and Pokémon – Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump’s Twitter skirmishes, which have seemed to receive as much attention as, if not more than, what the candidates say on the actual campaign trail. Even if the candidate is authoring the tweet, though, he or she is not usually doing the posting him- or herself. Trump is not crafting hashtags as he gets a pedicure in a bronze bathtub from a posse of four European supermodels (actually, he may be), nor is Clinton uploading memes to the Twitter app as she sits upright in a hotel room, picking at a Cobb salad, while Bill lounges in an armchair across the room, also silent, flipping through a newspaper (actually, she might be).

The man who runs Trump’s social accounts, Dan Scavino Jr, was – this is not a joke – a 16-year-old caddie at a country club in Briarcliff Manor, New York, when he met The Donald, in 1990. After accompanying Trump on the course, he rose up the ranks in the organization, eventually becoming the general manager of Trump National Golf Club, Westchester. Now in his 40s, Scavino is the man in charge of the Trump social media operation. While Trump’s tweets are characterized by a particular punchy vernacular (“Sad!” “Loser!” “I told you!”), the authorship of each tweet is left purposefully vague. When Trump received widespread criticism for a July tweet criticizing Clinton that included what was widely perceived to be a Star of David (pictured with the words “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever” over a pile of bills), the blame was – conveniently, for Trump – placed on Scavino. As for Trump’s follow-up tweet, featuring a Frozen colouring book adorned with a so-called sheriff’s star, The Washington Post reported that Trump chum Newt Gingrich and Trump himself had “kicked around” ideas for a response, which led to the crafting of the tweet – though this detail, notably, emerged after Scavino’s statement.

For Clinton’s accounts, there is more transparency in terms of who is doing the actual tweeting. “I think we’re pretty clear that not everything on Twitter comes from Hillary herself,” Clinton’s digital director, Jenna Lowenstein, told me. “Certainly, ‘Do you want to build a strawman?’ [Clinton’s retort to Trump’s Frozen tweet], I think it’s safe to say, was not direct from her mouth, but the signed tweets are messages that are from her. The unsigned ones are from campaign staff.” Lowenstein would not reveal the number of people on her social media squad (the entire digital team has been estimated at 100 people) but said the number of employees brainstorming Twitter responses is “probably fewer people than you’d expect.” She continued: “It’s not a laborious process. If there’s a great idea, it gets out into the world.” (Clinton herself is “actively involved on Twitter, as you can tell from her volume of signed tweets,” Lowenstein said.)

Lowenstein said that the primary objective of the Clinton social media effort is to use their platforms (and they use them all, including Snapchat and Pinterest) to “give people time with [Clinton].” Lowenstein explained, “Hillary Clinton is one of the most known women in the world but people don’t actually necessarily know things about her.” She said that responding rapidly to tweets from Clinton’s foes, especially Trump, is essential. “[Trump] has a unique ability, I think, to create conversation on Twitter, and so we know it’s really important for us to be there,” she said. “He’s good at Twitter insofar as he gets a lot of re-tweets sometimes, but his message, we believe, is going to be abhorrent to a lot of the American people, and so we at social media have to make sure people are seeing what he is saying.” But Lowenstein seems to welcome the challenge, responding, when asked how she feels about Trump’s social media presence this summer, “I’d say Twitter is a lot more fun in the general election.”

“White-Glove Services”

Scandal star Kerry Washington – perhaps appropriately, given the DC operator she plays on television – also, like the politicians, outsources her social media upkeep. (Washington has more than four million Twitter followers and three million Instagram followers.) All her accounts are run by her longtime friend Allison Peters, whom she has known since seventh grade. Peters calls what she provides for Washington (and other clients, such as actress Connie Britton) “white-glove personalized services”; Peters is focused on big- picture, strategic decisions and also the minutiae. She reads every single comment on all of Washington’s Instagram and Facebook posts (and does her best to comb through all tweets directed at Washington). She also writes and edits copy for posts Washington puts up on behalf of her projects and brands, always “making it sound like Kerry”, a job perhaps made easier by the fact that the two are real-life friends and have now been working together for five years. (As the Kleinberg-de Blasio fiasco makes clear, it is not always easy for a high-profile figure to find someone he or she can trust and who is the right fit.)

Lara Cohen, Twitter’s head of entertainment talent and lifestyle partnerships, who works with many celebrities and their teams on building their Twitter presences and promoting their projects, said she’s noticed an evolution in the sophistication of the social media managers themselves and what they can provide. “I think they’ve evolved, and I think there are much better ones out there who are advising their talent to be more authentic,” she said. “And I think a lot of people are using them in a way where it’s less obvious than those super- pluggy ones from days of yore.”

Peters said she has noticed a greater need for digital consultants like herself, given the increasing demands for content. “It’s hard for [celebrities] to stay on top of everything,” she said. “We know one of the keys to social media is being consistent. The fans don’t like [inconsistency].”

Let it Beiber

Scooter Braun – the 35-year-old manager of Justin Bieber and Kanye West (among others) and the man credited with discovering Bieber – has a managerial philosophy as it relates to social media, and also more generally, that is grounded in letting the stars in his stable roam free. He told me that when people ask him to reveal the “secret” to the viral social media success of his clients and projects, he explains to them that he encourages “intimate interactions”. Braun also used that “authenticity” buzzword, noting the success of supermodel Karlie Kloss (with her more than five million Instagram followers), whom he recently added to his roster of clients. “Especially with social media, people can see through it when it’s an act,” he said. “People are reacting to Karlie because it’s incredibly authentic.”

Braun said that “at the end of the day [his] job is to manage” and it’s the job of the artist “to make the decision” about what to be posting, but he admitted he is “very hands-on.” He summarized judiciously: “My job is to educate, teach, help build the strategy, and then, you know, trust that they can make the right decisions.”

But those “right decisions” are often made with Braun’s guiding hand on their shoulder. Hard as it may be to imagine West – whose tweets can be controversial, if not moronic (“BILL COSBY INNOCENT!!!!!!!!!!” he tweeted in February) – calling up Braun (or anyone, for that matter) to see if he thinks a tweet is kosher, that apparently does happen.

“When you’re an artist and you’re managing your social media, that’s where you ask the team and everyone else to check stuff. Ariana [Grande, a former client of his] used to, all the time, send me a message, ‘Hey, what do you think of this?’ Or, you know, Justin and Kanye… They all do. Like ‘Hey, what do you think?’”

As for the more risqué posts from West and Bieber – who has a penchant for posting semi-nude selfies and rambling notes about fame – Braun said he will always encourage his artists to be themselves. “When you’re doing [social media] for yourself, you’re gonna make mistakes along the way because you get passionate, and you want to say something, and sometimes, that judgement of the whole world, they’re not understanding the context of what you’re saying within the moment of your own life.” He paused, reflecting for a second. “You know, I look at Justin and I think, There’s a lot of stuff he put on social media [in the past] that I was not happy with…. But then there was stuff that he put that was great. And I think, at the end of the day, he’s now having the biggest moment of his career because people saw the human in that.”

West is known to cause spikes in internet traffic (and decreases in office productivity) when he begins one of his notorious tweet storms in the middle of the day. And Braun said that any one who is offended by West’s thoughts may be missing the Kanye forest for the Kanye trees. “It’s like [looking at] a great painting, right? If you’re standing too close to it and you only see one brush stroke, you might say, ‘What’s so great about this?’ But when you take a step back, you realize that all the strokes combined together make a masterpiece. I think sometimes people focus on just the music with Kanye and they wonder, ‘Oh, the rest of that, why is he doing that?’ But if you actually take a step back, it’s truly great performance art.” He added, “You don’t know what he’s gonna [tweet]; you might not agree with him, but you can respect the fact that it’s coming from a real place.”

On Their Own

If there were a textbook titled Our Social Media Age, Kim Kardashian West would almost certainly be on the cover. Kardashian has more than 48 million Twitter followers and 80 million Instagram followers, and yet, despite those daunting totals – millions of people eager for content on a daily basis – she told me, in an e-mail, that she is able to handle all of her social media posts on her own.

Kardashian said it’s important to her that she write all her own posts, and, yes, she is dedicated to authenticity – that hallowed ideal! – too. “I have felt overwhelmed at times, especially when I’m with the kids,” she said of her social media responsibilities. “I like to give [North and Saint] my full attention and not be on my phone, so I do feel like I want to post and get busy sometimes. I do take the time to take a second for myself to post and see what other people are posting. I could never see me hiring someone. For me, it wouldn’t seem authentic. Because it’s all about me, I couldn’t imagine trying to find someone to do that for me.”

But that does not mean Kim doesn’t have her version of a social media consultant. I always assumed there was someone in Kim’s life – Kanye? Kris Jenner? an inflatable swan in her swimming pool? – offering advice on posts (“Yes, your arms look amazing from that angle… Not as much in this one… Next”). It turned out I was not too far off.

“I will ask friends what they think of a certain picture, but I am so picky when it comes to my image. I want to be in full control,” Kim said. She explained she gets input and advice from others “all the time,” though. “I will send two pictures to my friends or assistant and ask which they like better. Just tonight, I posted a pic of my friend Larsa [Pippen] for her birthday and sent three pictures to my assistant and asked which she liked best because I couldn’t decide. I love asking caption advice too – sometimes I draw a blank.”

Emily Ratajkowski – the 25-year-old actress and model with more than eight-and-a-half million Instagram followers – said she appreciates the “authorship” social media provides her with. “Mostly my feeling now is just I am so lucky to be a part of this generation of people who get to have access to social media in the public eye. Because it just allows you so much of your own authorship of who you are, which I cannot imagine being without at this point.” After Kardashian caused a public outcry in March when she posted a nude selfie on Instagram, Ratajkowski came to her defense, and the two later posted a joint topless selfie on both of their accounts.

In a way, Ratajkowski – with whom I discussed Game Of Thrones and the Met Gala briefly before we moved on to Instagram, as if playing a conversational game of millennial bingo – serves as her own social media manager. “There is a difference in what I would send to my family or post on Facebook on my private account, versus what I’ll post on Instagram,” she told me. Occasionally, like Kardashian, she will seek counsel. “Sometimes I will run it by my boyfriend, or whoever I’m with, and be like, ‘Is this right?’ Because it’s hard to have perspective on it.”

In fact, Ratajkowski’s social media success has become a lucrative side job for her. The income she has made through sponsorships and brand deals, related to her social media accounts, has allowed her to be choosier about film roles, she said. “Honestly, I’ve been really lucky – because of my social media I haven’t had to compromise on roles,” she explained. “Because I’m making money via social. That’s a huge part of my income and if that wasn’t there, then I would be taking every movie that was offered to me. My career would be in a much different place.” The amount of money a celebrity is paid by a company to post about their clothing line or make-up product differs greatly based on the influence and reach of the individual, but Women’s Wear Daily recently estimated that a big-name celebrity with a large social following, such as Kylie Jenner or Taylor Swift, can earn up to $300,000 for a single sponsored Instagram post. (And one post from Selena Gomez, who currently has the most followers on Instagram, is “worth” about $550,000, per a recent analysis.) Ratajkowski tries to make sure the sponsored posts on her Instagram are consistent with the overall feel of the account. “I have an aesthetic that sometimes probably drives people who work on the ad side a little insane because I do want it to feel natural,” she said. “I don’t want it to feel like someone just dropped, you know, a Toyota ad in the middle of my thing.” (This commitment to posting only sponsored content that “feels right”, or – say it with me now – authentic, was something I heard again and again. Mike Heller, CEO of the agency Talent Resources, told me that Beyoncé once turned down a “million-dollar deal” it had set up for her with a hair brand, after “three months of going back and forth,” because the singer “just didn’t connect with the brand.”)

There’s something a bit disheartening about hearing, again and again, about the “strategy” that goes into celebrity social media accounts. It’s more fun to believe, when we scroll past a party photo posted by Selena Gomez, that she, like any of our friends might have on a Sunday morning, semi impulsively decided over brunch to put up one of her pictures from the previous night – that she looked through her iPhone Camera Roll for a few minutes before finding one she liked, then tried out a few filters, shaking her head, squinting, until she found the right one. When I was told by two people that Gomez “definitely” has professional photographers shooting some of her social media content, it made sense (the production values on many of her Instagram posts are of a higher quality than those of most summer blockbuster movies), but it was also a bit of a letdown (even if she is not necessarily alone in this practice). Celebrities, much as we may wish to believe otherwise, are not our friends. They have professional photographers at their parties. They have other people helping them write tweets. They are very clued in, however upfront they may be about it in interviews, as to what reaction any given post will receive from their audience. They are, on some level, always selling something.

Perhaps that is part of the appeal of Snapchat, where celebrities broadcast everyday moments – car rides, meals, concerts – from their daily life, their posts disappearing after 24 hours. There is still likely some strategy behind what celebrities decide to share on Snapchat, but there is a very tangible layer – that social media manager touch, however light it may be – which is removed on Snapchat. We can see the celebrity is holding his or her phone and speaking to us directly, in the exact same way we or one of our friends would Snap. But there is still a distance there, too; much as a celebrity chooses to share with us, there is always going to be something they’re not sharing – not tweeting, not Instagramming, not Snapchatting. We are seeing what they want us to see. Social media may not have changed the notion of Celebrity Smiling Down At Us From A Poster On Our Bedroom Wall as much as one might think. The poster has just taken a different form.